Bloomin' Young People

Last weekend I drove through driving rain to go to a festival called WOMAD (World of Music And Dance) at Charlton Park in Wiltshire where I took part in a panel discussion about young people and the future of food, farming, transport, energy and the environment.

It was organised by Ecotricity, a renewable energy company and I was one of four 'mentors' who had been in touch with one of the four young finalists.

Here they are with Ecotricity supremo Dale Vince.

I was mentoring Nerys Pickup (on far left) who's dad Chris has a Hybrid Toyota Auris and the two of them have become very interested in the future of transport, energy, electric cars and related topics. She is an amazing 15 year old who spoke to a crowd of many hundreds of people with self-assurance and clarity.

The others taking part, ranging in age from 13 to 15 were equally impressive, they had an amazing grasp of their chosen topic and answered questions from the audience with confidence and insight.

Blimey, they were really annoying. When I was 15 I would have mumbled and stuttered and only been able to deliver half baked notions I had almost zero understanding of. It's not fair! Why are they so damn clever?

On a marginally more serious note it gave all the adults attending a glimmer of hope against the backdrop of the rain and a current government hell bent on destroying any and all renewable energy projects and staunchly supporting their fossil overlords.

One minor example of the true depths of casual indifference this government is showing toward sustainable technology is the (and prepare to laugh at the title) Minister for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd.

Apart from the fact that this government is now second only to the climate change denying Australian Government, apart from the fact that Ms Rudd has slashed and burnt her way through just about every environmental policy previous governments have introduced, some fairly dodgy behaviour has recently come to light that even the wretched Daily Mail have felt the need to report.

Government Ministers are under strict scrutiny about their contacts outside government. We don’t want them being influenced by parties unknown, we want transparency in our politicians.

So they are required to report on anyone they are in contact with who might try and influence their decisions or apply pressure on them.

It’s a parliamentary rule, they all have to do it. Unfortunately Ms Rudd somehow forgot to mention her brother Roland. Well it's just her brother, what's important about that?

Her brother happens to be an energy lobbyist who chairs a lobbying company called Finsbury who represent the Halite Energy Group.

Who are they?

Well, they’re a nice bunch of chaps who want to install a 900 million cubic meter ‘natural’ gas storage facility for fracked gas under a river in Lancashire, in an area renown for being seismically unstable, What could possibly be wrong with that. LOL.

Anyway, boring Westminster shenanigans aside, the point is these old energy systems are just that, old energy systems, dated, failing, corrupting, decrepit and increasingly desperate.

Sure Roland Rudd is raking it in at the moment, blimey, I want to be a lobbyist for a gas company, he’s on around £3 million a year, but anyone with two brain cells knows the Rudds of this world are doomed to fail.

The immense global momentum behind renewable energy technology is not going to grind to a halt because a handful of uber-privileged numbskulls in the UK kow-tow to their old energy elite siblings and pals.

Of course this sets us back in the UK but the simple fact remains, renewable energy always gets cheaper, all the other options will continue to get more expensive and more fraught with stress.

This idiotic government will impose fracking as long as it isn’t near their own houses, do it up North and hope no one will notice.

They’ll bow before the oil sheiks, the coal bullies and the gas tzars, they will waste billions on absurd technologies that will dig us further into the pit, but they will fail.

Let us not be downhearted but rejoice in that failure.

The young people I met last weekend see right through the painfully obvious anti wind farm rhetoric of the Rudds, being anti wind farm only means one thing, you are pro burning fossils because there is more profit in it and that profit is for shareholders only, unlike community renewable projects which share the money locally.

And of course when you get booted out of office you can go and work with your brother and rake in a few mill for the pension.